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Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.

Robert M. Pirsig

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Robert M. Pirsig
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 6
Died: 2017
Died: April 24
Autobiographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Robert Maynard Pirsig
Fighting
Socrates
War
Vacuums
Truth
Vacuum
Ideas
Relative
Everything
Absolutes
Think
Absolute
Thinking
Noble
Expounding
Middle
Absolutism

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

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Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.
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That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.
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An evolutionary morality argues that The North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation
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Education should not be fun. You are being brought up into society and society has a way of doing things. It may not be pleasant but sooner or later you are going to have to do it anyway.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.
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The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Quality... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is.
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Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.
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What I am is a heretic who's recanted, and thereby in everyone's eyes saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.
Robert M. Pirsig
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What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man.
Robert M. Pirsig
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A thing that has no value does not exist.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
Robert M. Pirsig
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I really am a recluse. I just enjoy watching the wind blow through the trees. In America someone who sits around and does that is at the bottom of the ladder, but in Japan, say, someone who goes up into the mountains is accorded great respect. I guess I am somewhere in between. I enjoy reclusion: it clears my mind.
Robert M. Pirsig
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A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Objects are inorganic and biological values subjects are social and intellectual values.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Good is a noun rather than an adjective.
Robert M. Pirsig
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(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.
Robert M. Pirsig